NORTH SHORE BREEZE 
The Lure of Dim Mountain Trails 
Former Mining Home of Robert Louis Stevenson 
By M. J. BROWN 
(Continued from last week) 
And far up on the mountain side 
we found it—or rather found the 
place that was once his home—tfor 
Silverado has been torn down and 
carted away, and all that remains of 
a once mountain of industry is the 
yawning mouth of the old shaft and 
the tablet where stood the miners 
shack where Stevenson made his 
home for many months. 
There today are the abandoned 
shaft, the shoot, the dump, the forge, 
the rails with a miner’s cart rotting 
away on them; there are broken im- 
plements, 0 old rusted tin utensils. 
All is decay and silence. How Stev- 
enson could have stood it so long and 
rerained sane, I do not understand. 
There is something uncanny about the 
whole place anda “lonesomeness steals 
over you, You want to get away, want 
to run, want to get out where you can 
yell and not feel as if you were in a 
cemetery. 
Near the forge house was a cluster 
of thick madronas, where was Stev- 
enson’s favorite seat, the place where 
he passed many hours at his w ritings. 
It is a beautiful view overlooking the 
Napa valley for many, many miles— 
as far as the eye can reach, 
And sitting on this ledge, fighting 
against drea d consumption, no “doubt 
yearning for his beloved Scotland he 
wrote these lines: 
“A fine place, after all, for a 
wasted life to doze away in—the 
cuckoo clock hooting of the far 
home country.” 
For years he fought the white 
plague, but it finally conquered, and 
ioday his body lies buried in far off 
Samoa, on a mountain top which trav- 
elers say has a striking resemblance 
to Mount Saint Helena. 
Several of the characters in Stev- 
enson’s sketches are living in Cali- 
fornia today. 
And just a few lines about Silver- 
ado mine—once a hole in the ground 
whose everyday life was ‘keenly 
wate bedet DY hundreds of investors and 
speculators. 
Either Silverado was the biggest 
hard luck mine in California, or it 
was the biggest swindling game ever 
niaide a success of. And there are 
pinty of men in the Napa valley 
who will take either sde of the prop- 
osition. 
Some say over a half million dol- 
lars were taken out of this mine in a 
short time, while others will em- 
phatically declare there was never an 
ounce of silver taken out that was 
not first taken in. 
Some say that the wonderfully rich 
vein suddenly pinched out and no end 
of drifting could locate it again. 
\~d others state it was the raw- 
est bunco game San Francisco ever 
devised and every ounce of silver 
was salted, borrowed from another 
mine as a basis for selling two mil- 
lion dollars in shares. 
If it was a fake it was a beautiful 
one. A city sprung up like a mush- 
room, and all California watched the 
mine. Then the vein was lost and 
the town went to decay. 
There is many a man who believes 
that the lost seam will again be found. 
Many a squatter has, jumped the 
claim believing the mine was plugged, 
and some day, when stock could be 
bought for a cent a share, it would 
be opened again. 
I looked into the black hole and 
thought of the many hopes that were 
buried there—hopes of wealth. 
Then I went down to the madrona 
thicket, where Stevenson used to sit, 
looked off across the valley and 
thought of the one great hope that 
was lost there, the hope of health. 
Silverado is a mine of buried hopes. 
Next week—“Strange Stories of 
Odd Corners.” 
LOBSTERS FOR THE PACIFIC 
The first shipment has been made 
of Maine lobsters to the Puget 
Sound region in furtherance of the 
plan which is ardently supported by 
Secretary of Commerce Redfield; and 
a systematic campaign has been open- 
ed to establish the eastern lobster 
on the Pacific coast. A number of 
previous attempts along this same 
line have been made, but the present 
plan differs from its predecessors in 
that there has been a special selection 
of waters in which it is hoped the 
spawn will multiply. 
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